Naver kicking Google’s ass: Businessweek

by Robert Koehler on February 1, 2006

Businessweek looks at why Naver.com (my search engine of choice ) is trouncing Google in Korea.

{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }

1 sewing February 1, 2006 at 10:00 am: I like Naver too, but… Boolean and site-specific searches seem to be completely disabled. There’s this (apparently obsolete) help page that indicates such searches were at one time possible…or does one have to be logged in to use such features? So if you want to do any kind of advanced searching, it gets tricky.

I also recall reading somewhere on the Naver site that results are ranked by click-through rate…in other words, the most clicked-through blog/page/site comes first, followed by the next most often clicked through, etc. But isn’t this a vicious circle? Naturally, isn’t everyone going to click on the first few hits and not even bother to go to the “?????…” page? So the top results are always going to stay at the top.

…But yeah, all the multimedia stuff that comes up whenever you search is pretty cool. And their spiders/robots/whatever don’t just surf Korea-based domains. Type in some English-language search terms and you may be surprised at what comes up…city council minutes from your hometown, for example!
2 sewing February 1, 2006 at 10:10 am: Sorry, forgot the links.

Search help page: http://www.naver.com/help/searchhelp.html

…And the results are based on a combination of relevance and click-through rates. From Naver’s ??? ???:

???????? ?????????????? ???????? ???????? ??? ?????????????? ?????? ???????? ????? ?????????????????? ??????????? ????????????.

And their dictionaries–especially the ??? dictionary–are pretty darned good.
3 kushibo February 1, 2006 at 10:32 am: I think this is an example of how people’s worries that globalization will lead to a McGlobal economy don’t always pan out: the message seems to be that Naver is winning because it did a better job of giving locals what they want.

Someone I used to know was one of the writers for this article, by the way. Yay, me!
4 bluejives February 1, 2006 at 10:46 am: Navel gazing google ass? What?
5 sewing February 2, 2006 at 4:25 am: Hmmm…I shouldn’t even take the bait and I have no idea what you wrote, Bluejives—or even if it was directed to me—but dude, whatever you wrote seems distinctly trollish.

I like Naver and use it a lot. My comments were not to slight it or to say that it’s inferior to Google. In some ways, it’s superior. But when I have to do advanced searches (proximity, literal strings, site-specific, etc.) it sometimes lets me down. That’s all.
6 bluejives February 2, 2006 at 5:11 am: “Hmmm?? shouldn?? even take the bait and I have no idea what you wrote, Bluejives??r even if it was directed to me??ut dude, whatever you wrote seems distinctly trollish.”

Chill. It wasn’t directed at anybody. It’s just a gratuitous silly remark. I’m hardly the only one.
7 sewing February 2, 2006 at 6:45 am: Okay, sorry. No, there’s certainly no shortage of “gratuitous silly remarks” hereabouts!